


More Than Most Fair, Full of the Living Fire

by akathecentimetre



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Found Family, Gen, M/M, Recovery, Religion, Resurrection, Spoilers, UnDeadwood Mini-series (Critical Role), Undead, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-07 14:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21459229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: [SPOILERS FOR THE FINALE]First, they raise him.Then, they make sure to keep raising each other.
Relationships: (background), Miriam Landisman/Arabella Whitlock, Reverend Matthew Mason/Clayton Sharpe
Comments: 19
Kudos: 161





	More Than Most Fair, Full of the Living Fire

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't anticipate this being my first fic in the CR fandom (there will hopefully be more anon), but 1. then this miniseries stole my entire heart and soul and smashed them both into itty bitty pieces and 2. fix-it fics are what I _do_. Hope you enjoy this!

*

They'd buried him with his hat over his face, and it had almost looked like he was sleeping. It occurs to Miriam, though, much later, that she had never seen the man known as Clayton Sharpe at any sort of peaceful rest before he breathed his last, so that that understanding, too, may have been no more than a placating sort of illusion.

Now they are back in the Bullock Hotel and Miriam is watching Arabella cry herself into a semblance of what she hopes, eventually, will be real rest. The Reverend had murmured something, abashedly and with only a small, shamed sense of propriety about taking her home to her lawful husband; Miriam had refused on Arabella's behalf, and Mason had looked relieved to be reprimanded for it.

"Will y'stay?" Arabella had choked out; her knuckles had been white around Miriam's to the point of pain, and so here they are, now, in the gathering dark and the dull glow of the blood-red sunset, with Arabella curled under a thin sheet in her underthings, golden hair tangled above her, and Miriam is alone to let her mind wander through the streets with the shellshocked Mason, imagining how his face is changing and shifting and breaking as he makes his weary way back towards his cold bed at the church.

Miriam can't help but wonder at it – that this beautiful creature can have been so destroyed by the loss of someone she'd known for not thirty-six hours. Looking at the tear-tracks drying on Arabella's pale cheeks, she suspects that that sentiment is a part of what _is _Arabella to a far more integral extent than Arabella herself is aware of.

It makes Miriam fall just a little bit more into a sense of comfort that she hasn't had in weeks – that she had thought abandoned in a smoldering shack, deep in the Badlands.

It staves off her hatred. More importantly, it staves off her helplessness. Nonetheless, she doesn’t want to sleep, and she doesn’t want to dream, for fear of her nightmares being inhabited by snakes and cards and some tangled, unholy mess of what she’s sure justice _doesn’t_ mean, and so she doesn’t. She stays sitting by Arabella, and even when her hand loosens around Miriam’s she doesn’t move away. She keeps an eye out of the window next to the bedstead; she keeps a lantern lit and well-fed with oil so it never even thinks of sputtering out.

She doesn’t know what comes next, now, and she hates that too.

“Curse you,” she whispers to the dawn, as it starts to creep over the hills; word must have spread quickly through the surrounding area that the town was safe again, because there are already wagons of residents making their weary way back down the dusty thoroughfare and homes having the boards taken off their windows in the early light – and she hates them for it, hates that they got to live when one of their saviors didn’t. “And curse you, too.”

Feet pound up the stairs close to six by her pocketwatch, small feet, and she is too tired to pull her derringer when a small rap is followed by the door creaking open and, at only a few feet above the floor, a small urchin-like face peers in.

“Beg pardon, ma’am,” the little boy pants; he has snot at the corner of his nostrils and the thrill of the chase in his eyes. “The Reverend sent me. Asked y’all to come down and see him at the church right quick, ma’am.”

Miriam looks down at Arabella; slowly withdraws her hand, and in as smooth a motion as she can muster, without stopping (for if she stops at all she won’t go), she swishes to the door and closes it behind her as she steps out into the hallway. “Good boy,” she tells the child, hushed. “You go down to the bar and tell the man tending it that I want him to come upstairs and keep a watchful eye on Mrs. Whitlock, you hear? You do that properly and you’ll get a gold piece coming to you by the end of the day.”

“Yes, ma’am!” he grins, and rushes down ahead of her; by the time she reaches the ground floor of the Bullock the boy, nameless, is slamming his hand cheerfully and repeatedly down on the bell at the counter and Sol Star, his eyes gummed with sleep and grumbling mightily, is emerging from whatever den he sleeps in back of the hardware store, pulling the straps of his suspenders over his half-open shirt.

Miriam Landisman is a woman who makes entrances, but this morning there is no need, and she doubts anyone pays her any attention as she walks. It suits her mood, on this particular day, and when she gets to the church and sees no-one waiting for her outside she starts to think that maybe she should just stand here, in the middle of chaos, and do nothing. It would be a welcome change.

She’s only there in that moment of quiet, though, for but a moment before the side-door to the church, soot-blackened and askew, swings open and the Reverend is peering out at her. He looks like he’s seen a ghost, his expressive, open face moving and working in a way which makes her think that he can’t decide whether to be terrified or whether he thinks he’s experienced a rapture, and it makes her nervous.

“Reverend?” she calls, not wanting to move quite yet. “Is everything alright?”

“I don’t know,” he says, his voice cracking. “Please – please, Miss Miriam, come inside – I don’t know what to – ”

She takes the offer of his shaking hand, steps gingerly over the splintered threshold. The church, in daylight, finally, is still something beautiful inside, beams of light breaking through the holes in the roof and birds nesting in its nooks and crannies; the Reverend has re-erected the altar and straightened some of the whitewashed pews, and in one of them –

There is a body half-sat, half-lying in the first pew of the sanctuary, askew and partly-burnt as it is. He is covered in grave-dirt, heavy and stinking, and when he breathes it is with the sucking rattle of a dying snake as his head and filthy hair hang back over the splintered wood.

"I prayed," the Reverend is saying, breathy with delight and shock. "I prayed for His indulgence, and by all that is holy, He answered!"

"Jesus wept," Miriam whispers. The shock of it, of the apparent proof that _Oh, no_, there is another deity altogether involved in the travesties of Deadwood, momentarily stops her in her tracks.

And then she hurries forward to help the priest lift what has come back of Clayton Sharpe, and it is as if she no longer has to worry about the future at all.  
  


*

It is touch and go for longer than her initial burst of joy would have hoped for, after that. They take a room for Sharpe in the Bullock (they put his name down as Amos King, and hope it is unlike enough that the accursed wanted poster that started the explosion of their world will not provoke further scrutiny), and then, for most of the following week, Miriam, Arabella, and the Reverend do not leave unless it is absolutely necessary. Miriam watches out of the corner of her eye as the Reverend, insisting on the ladies' modesty (as if they had any left to be affected), undresses Sharpe from his burial clothes and puts him in ones of his own, watches his hands be so reverent that she wonders whether he handles his vestments and the tools of his faithful trade with just as much care. Arabella hesitantly, then more boldly, plies her fledgling skills as a surgeon to remove the remnants of Fogg's bullets, and in the quieter moments they have of waiting for Sharpe to wake Miriam watches the idea of becoming Deadwood's physician float through Arabella's speech like a half-remembered dream, more and more frequently invoked.

She is the one on watch, with Arabella once again asleep - she is getting better at it, better at not needing to scream her sister's name into Miriam's neck before she feels capable of lying down - when Sharpe's eyes first open, and for a long moment, Miriam wonders if there is anything of him left in there, so pallid and so empty is his expression.

"Well, fuck," Sharpe rasps, eventually.

"Good evening, Clayton," she murmurs; she leans over him where he has lain like the dead in his cot, puts a hand on his shoulder and lets the surge of affection in her heart bubble up into the smile she knows stuns and elates most people who see her. "I'm so glad to see you come back among us."

Sharpe takes a few long, harsh breaths, struggling with them, still staring upwards at the dark ceiling. "I'm hurtin', Miss Miriam."

"I know," she soothes. "You rest. You take it easy, my boy, and we'll make sure you're safe. Arabella and the Reverend and I are aren't fixing to quit you."

She takes a good deal of quiet pride in the fact that she thinks it is _her _voice, above all others, which he is willing to take as a promise: he settles, twitching with pain and what she knows must be a deep, lingering confusion for a long time, but he settles nonetheless at her touch, and she turns away to indulge in her tears.

When it comes to Arabella, she throws herself on Sharpe as though he is her brother lost in the womb, and Miriam doesn't let her see _too _many moments of her giggling before she comes to the spluttering gunslinger's rescue; Arabella saves her quiet grief that _this _resurrection was granted over another only later, when only Miriam can see her wrestle it firmly into submission. When it comes to the Reverend, he clasps one of Clayton's hands between both of his; his face cracks open into a wide smile of morning joy, and prayers and praises and relief trip quickly from his tongue.

Clayton looks at Miriam; she nods, and he looks at Mason and manages to grin back.

Life in Deadwood, somehow, goes on. Miriam dreams of the Dealer, but as if through a curtain. Arabella, too, tells her that her fading nightmares contain a good deal of bright light, and the distant shake of rattlers' tails. In one late afternoon when Sharpe's gut is troubling him, the lead of the bullet that tore through him sending what he says feels like poison dripping into his blood, the Reverend, almost without thinking, asks for healing and hears nothing back.

Miriam can't say that she misses it.

Clayton changes, over these days, as Arabella reluctantly goes back to her husband's abode in the evenings (Miriam lies awake in the dark and feels cold, so cold) and Mason begins to turn his mind in earnest to the project of rebuilding what is now undoubtedly his church. In the first few days after he woke, he did not seem to need food, nor water; he looked at the sustenance brought to his bedside strangely, and Miriam caught her breath at the thought that what had returned of him was not entirely alive, to be refusing this proof of humanity. But the color returns to his cheeks, gradually, as do the citizens to the half-deserted down; Al Swearengen ceases to curse the slowness of his business, and the quartet of ladies at the Bella Union begin to be busy again.

A week after his raising, Miriam finds Clayton's bed empty, and finds the man himself at the church, carefully wielding a hammer and watching the Reverend as Mason skirts his way slowly along the edge of the charred roof. They are not alone, and Miriam supposes that Clayton's identity must have held water given that he seems to be forming a normal part of the ragtag group of men, and a few women, working on re-establishing the strength of the wooden building's foundations, straightening the pews and sweeping cinders and dust out from its corners.

Miriam lets the sense that they're all being watched go, for the moment, in lieu of reveling in the strength of the sun on her skin, and the shade cast upon it when Arabella arrives with a parasol for them to share, looping a cool arm through hers.

When the church is finished, the workmen sweep the Reverend, flushed with pleasure at his success, out to the Bella Union for what they assume will be a night of uproariousness; Miriam, knowing better and pitying those men for the embarrassment of their future ladies abandoning them for the simple pleasure of Mason's flustered, chaste conversation, goes to the Gem for a drink and finds what she expected. Clayton has reclaimed the corner table he had marked as his when he was Sharpe, and Johnny and Dan, clearly knowing when and how to keep their mouths shut, have supplied him with his usual bottle of whiskey and – a neat touch – four glasses.

All as ordered, Miriam thinks, except for the unfamiliar sight of a man such as Clayton, still covered in a light powdering of desert dust from a hard day of laboring with his hands, leaning over a battered copy of the Good Book as though he expects to find his fate secretly printed in one of its pages.

"Not bothering you, am I, Mr. Sharpe?" she murmurs, and when he looks up he seems startled, but not surprised. "I've been remiss, by the by, in not asking you what name you'd prefer we call you now, dear."

"Hm," he says; he gives the question some thought as she sits, the Bible still open underneath the press of his forearms. "You came to know me as Clayton, Miss Miriam. I think you an' me both might as well keep with it."

"I understand," she smiles, and pours herself a drink, freshens his. "I hadn't taken you for a man of faith, darlin'."

"I ain't," Sharpe says immediately, his tone certain even as he nods slightly towards her, acknowledging the irony. "I'm not – confirming any faith, lookin' in this here book. Though I imagine the good Reverend would've been pleased to think as much when he lent it to me."

"What are you looking for, then?"

Clayton looks down at the neat lines of tiny, black print. His mouth tightens. "Answers."

Miriam nods, her suspicions solidified. She's spent the last few days, after all, watching how Sharpe had carefully and methodically avoided the crucifix mounted in the new church of Deadwood; how his eyes had slid sideways, only just peering, reluctantly, at the bleeding feet of the affixed Christ as he went, as if unwilling to acknowledge a debt or any sort of gratitude. She remembers how he had skirted the use of whatever magic they had had until the last possible opportunity, and how some nameless tension had visibly drained from him as they all discussed how the memory of what it had felt like to have the Dealer's power flowing through them was ebbing, drifting, sliding away no matter how much some of them wanted to recall it.

Clayton Sharpe was not a man who wished, nor needed, to admit any higher power into sharing the control he hoped to have over his life, and Miriam Landisman, procurer, independent woman of means, lover of a wild witch from the East, and murderer (in the eyes of the law), could understand that completely.

"I see," she says gently. "Well – the _how _may be in doubt, but just don't you go wondering anything about _why _it is you're with us, darlin'. I won't have you doubting the power of affection that brought you back to us, nor doubt your own worth."

Clayton huffs, and Miriam knows she's taking a risk when she reaches out and lifts his chin with a brief touch of the side of her index finger, taking his frank, questioning look and returning it.

"Don't, honey," she says again, sweeter. "The Reverend's prayers were answered. If nothing else, you can respect that effort from him, can't you?"

Sharpe's eyes flicker; something in him visibly warms, and then he colors slightly and looks away again, knowing she has seen it. "Sure, I can do that much," he says, quietly.

They drink. And they drink some more, and she puts her arm through Sharpe’s as they leave, sometime around midnight, and find the Reverend marching through town fresh as a daisy, singing the Battle Hymn at the top of his bassy voice as he urges the workmen, most of them grasping their heads and moaning, towards their beds. Miriam laughs, and sees Arabella lurking behind Mason in the dark, her grin sharp and bright as she indicates that she’s going to slip into the Bullock, and if Miriam sees Sharpe smiling and ambling amiably next to the good priest as they both make their way towards the church – well, given what she anticipates going upstairs to, with her heart full and her thoughts buzzing –

– she’s not one to judge. Not tonight, at any rate.  
  


*

Time passes, more than three weeks since the raising, and they receive a summons from Al.

Miriam can’t say that her impressions of the Head Cock of Deadwood have improved in the interim. She had never liked Swearengen, and now – now she thinks that, if she were able to admit it to herself, she is afraid of him. She wonders whether Arabella would find the imprint of an ourobouros snake on his chest if he were to be strapped down in the office that was formerly Doc Cochran’s; she wonders what his self-satisfied little smirks mean, what it is he’s hiding at the back of his eyes when they alight on Clayton and sparkle with something she hopes isn’t malignant.

This time, though, the Sheriff, looking just as uncomfortable as Miriam feels, is in the office above the Gem Saloon with Al, which goes a long way to putting her at ease. The job this time is a co-commission from them both: the business and the law outfits of the town are united in wanting order brought to a particular section of the town outskirts where, in the midst of the disruption brought about by most of the town’s population upping sticks and returning just as suddenly, a band of long riders has been harassing some of the minor gold claims and homesteads. Half a dozen of them, they think, or perhaps a couple more; hardened men who don’t know any other life but that what comes out of a saddle and who drift across the plains like a slow-burning brushfire, threatening violence and destruction at any moment.

Two hundred and fifty gold for each of them, as usual, Al says, as though he is bored. No weird shit. Kill them or drive them off; bring ‘em to church, Reverend, I don’t care – and be done with it.

As they exit the Gem and say their more genteel goodbyes to the Sheriff, Miriam looks quickly down a side alley, takes a deep breath when she sees nothing, and goes on her way with the others to the livery, taking solace and revelry in the glint of thrill-seeking she sees in Arabella’s eyes, bursting forth from dormancy.

Two days’ ride, checking on burned outhouses and gathering statements from witnesses, many bearing wounds and spitting bitterly at the fate that could have brought them to the long riders’ attention just when they were really starting to make headway. The Reverend keeps their spirits up with hymns sung slow and lowly, echoing across the scrubland, and Miriam sees Clayton smiling to himself under the brim of his hat.

On the second night, they take shelter, with a small, flickering fire, in a cave burrowed out from the wall of an enormous, looming mesa. The Reverend is snoring within moments with his Bible and shotgun (unloaded, thankfully) across his lap; Arabella takes longer to settle as she primly takes the time to brush red clay dust fastidiously from her cloth before promptly falling asleep in another pile of it, leaving a trail of soot across her cheeks. Miriam can only doze, knowing that she will need to wake for second watch (the men had attempted to establish a system which ‘spared the ladies,’ as they put it, and were severely and roundly cursed for their trouble), and when she rouses herself it is to the sight of Clayton standing motionless against the wall of the cave, one hand on his hip and his eyes fixed outwards to where the sliver of a crescent moon has cast a pale wash over the desert.

“All right there, Mr. Sharpe?” Miriam yawns.

“Yes, ma’am. Just – contemplatin’.”

She smiles, leaning on her elbow, not yet persuaded to get up. “What sorts of things?”

He chuckles, not looking away from his post; he’s gotten used, Miriam knows, to her particular brand of teasing, which she also knows is quite the concession from a man such as himself. “Old friends, and new ones.”

Miriam pauses; thinks; decides. “Will you tell me about the old ones?”

Clayton isn’t one for life stories; she’d guessed as much, but she has to admit that she’s surprised to hear him admit it openly. He starts haltingly, clearing his throat, his gaze a little distracted, now, as though distinct parts of him are separating out, one the gunslinger on guard and one the ill-practiced narrator.

There are lots of towns in Texas, still, like the one where he started. Mother got sick and went back East, as so many mothers did, and like so many never came back; father was a blacksmith and foundryman, well-liked and well-intentioned enough but never a man of any particular substance. Amos had gotten his name from his mother’s reading of the Bible, and never knew what it meant until it no longer mattered, until he’d had to jettison the weight of God he’d apparently been meant to carry.

He’d fallen in, eventually, with a group of young men whom he thought he respected, and whom he thought cared for him, in their own way. One of them was a boy by the name of Patrick Harvey, who was tall, good-looking, built beyond his years, and the heir of a mighty local mining fortune. He’d been slick and warm and oily in his affect, showering gold on anyone he thought could do him the slightest favor; he also had a temper, an enormous one that struck anyone who witnessed it dumb and cowering, and the first time Amos had been in the room it was a mighty occasion for it indeed, for Patrick’s younger brother had been chosen to inherit the mine over him. _Too flighty_, his father had sneered. _No boy with a head for horses and women instead of business will get this land out of me_. Patrick had raged and spit and raged some more, and Amos, in the moment, had been honored, underneath his terror, to be involved in the plotting and scheming which came next.

Wartime, they’d – _he’d_ – said. Summer of 1862, hot and drought-dry. No one gives a shit, no-one’s watching. It’s a prime time for a man who needs to get some revenge off of his chest while the sheriff and his deputies were busy organizing a regiment to send east to aid the Confederacy at the Mississippi, send horses to Virginia, send delegates to Houston to continue to debate Texan independence. They’d drawn lots, and Amos was pretty sure he knew that they had tricked him into receiving the King of Spades, the card of death, the one denoting the gravedigger among them.

It had been done in a crowded saloon, and, to be honest, in all the chaos of a regular Saturday evening (no thought of church in the morning on their minds), he wasn’t even sure if it had been his bullet that had found Patrick Harvey’s brother’s back. The town had turned on his so-called friends first, whispers and snide jeers saying that _Rich folks, they have their own sort of justice_ – when Amos’s name was flung out to them like a scrap among wild dogs they’d actually hesitated, thinking that no, not the Kinsley boy, he was always a quiet child. He didn’t have it in him.

But he did, and he knew it, so he’d run. He’d been chickenshit scared and gangly then, he says, without much mirth, and barely twenty-two, and he’d run like the Devil itself, whatever it looked like, was chasing him. In the months that followed, he learned that It looked like wanted posters, like narrow eyes sliding sideways towards him in the eyes of suspicious sheriffs, like the shoulders that turned away from him when he crept through derelict town after derelict town in search of work, spurning strangers and the trouble they brought.

It looked like Patrick’s face in his dreams, he adds to Miriam, as though it’s an afterthought, as he keeps staring out into the night. She knows it’s the heart of the whole thing, and she nearly reaches out to hold Sharpe’s hand before she realizes that she’s too far away where she’s sitting to touch him, and that if she moved any closer the spell would be broken.

“Not too much to tell, after that,” Clayton shrugs; he blinks, and looks back at Miriam, but keeps talking anyway even when she thinks she knows just what he means. Learned to use a gun properly, then two. Learned to be a better rider. He’d been invited to join various sheriff’s teams on the wandering road north, but he had refused them all, not wanting life to catch up to him among people he respected. Found some God, in the beauty of the lush grasslands that fed the farms of smallholders; lost most of it, then all of it, when men like the long riders they were chasing burned those farms down to settle debts.

In the end, Deadwood seemed as good a place to hide as any.

A night bird of some kind calls, low and long, and they both turn to look out towards the desert again over the embers of the fire.

“Someone’s been watching us,” Miriam breathes, and Clayton glances at her sharply.

“You’ve felt it too, huh?”

“Ever since we were first working on the church, after your raising,” she nods. “I don’t think I know what sort of – _thing_ it is.”

“Hm,” Clayton grunts. He unholsters one of his pieces, takes a few steps out of the cave’s entrance, and just stands there, lanky and upright, letting (Miriam knows) his eyes adjust to the darkness as he stares out. After a little while, with no more evidence of movement or life making themselves known, he nods to himself, puts away his Colt, and begins to slowly pace, a mountain cat marking its territory without ever looking back.

Miriam rarely sleeps when on the road, but this night ends up being an exception.  
  


*

They have taken her derringer and Arabella’s Colt, and Miriam, through her frustration and fury, can’t help but feel a little naked without them. The long riders – there are twelve of them, as it turns out, not the eight they had been warned of – are standing in a loose-limbed group around them, emptying bullets out of chambers and coiling rope that not long afterwards starts winding around Miriam’s wrists, keeping them in the small of her back; she kicks out at one of them when he tries to get handsy and is satisfied to feel and hear the grunt that testifies she’s made contact, and struggles her way through pairs of prodding arms to take a look at her men.

The ambush had been haphazard, but the advantage of numbers won out in the end in the confusion of this dark clearing in the scrubby trees where they’d been due to set up camp. The Reverend is sporting a shining bruise on his temple, and his movements, once he has been subdued, are slurred and clumsy; the nasty club of a rifle butt that he’d received had taken the wind out of all of them, leaving them all to be knocked down into the dirt. Clayton is pale-faced and grim where he has been forced down onto his haunches; he had fought and shot hard, leaving more than a few of the outlaws with bullet wounds, but the rip of his coat down his arms in the fray had left him pinioned and the rope has now finished the job.

“Well,” one of the long riders says, still somewhat out of breath (Miriam will cherish even this smallest of victories at this point) once the four of them have been sat down with their backs against each other. “What have we here, huh? Some hired guns of Swearengen’s, sent to keep us coyotes at bay?”

Others of the men are digging through their saddlebags, and one, then two of them whoop with glee as Miriam supposes they must find portions of the gold Al had given them, tucked away for emergencies as they traveled. She can feel Arabella muttering and seething next to her, her furious trains of thought given sound and movement as she tries to plot a way to freedom; Miriam, for her part, can’t help but think the endeavor already lost. If they are to get away from this with their lives, they shall have to accept some sort of defeat; it only matters that they make it back to some vestige of civilization intact, even if they have to do it on foot once the long riders have been persuaded to move on.

“We have many friends in camp, gentlemen,” she says, as boldly as she can manage; the long rider who had spoken, whom she guesses to be some sort of leader, who arches an eyebrow down at her. “It is very much not in your interest to harm us any further. We could be persuaded to move on and leave you to your work, in exchange for our safe passage.”

Clayton lets out a low, near-inaudible hiss of warning; Miriam doesn’t quite know if it’s meant for her or the outlaw, but, to her surprise and not a little bit of relief, the long rider shrugs. “Can’t say you’re wrong, woman,” he says, spitting on the ground at her feet. “We ain’t got no desire to start a war with Swearengen over any mongrels he’s decided are worth paying to do his dirty work.

“But,” he adds, and now there is something of a laugh in his raspy voice, as others of the riders begin to approach; “we ain’t no fools, neither, to leave open the possibility of private retribution. We ain’t got no use for the men – we’ll leave y’all to rot for the buzzards. But you ladies, at least, we can get some use out of before we turn y’loose – ”

He reaches out for Miriam’s hair.

Everyone around her moves at once, Arabella included, incandescent with rage – and yet it doesn’t surprise Miriam that Clayton is fastest, that it is his leg which kicks out hard at the approaching long rider, cracks an audible snapping sound out of the man’s knee and follows it, muffling the man’s yowl of pain, by scrambling to his feet and falling forward in a charge. Miriam is grabbed away as the remaining riders leap into them, yelling and cursing and pinning each of them down; she bites at the hand trying to reach for her neck, and as her victim yelps and draws away she catches sight of the end of their attempt.

Clayton is on his knees, strands of hair falling down over his face as the rest of it is grabbed in the thick glove of the long rider he had kicked. There is blood streaking from his nose and the barrel of a Colt pressed to his forehead, and in the flickering light of the fire Miriam knows, that if that gun goes off, she will never forget the snarl on his face, so full of certainty, so full of rage, so bent on revenge even for the mere mention of harm being brought to –

“Fuckin’ snake,” the long rider spits, jerking Sharpe’s head back. “Should’a gunned you down soon as we rode up – ”

The gun goes off, and Arabella screams – and Miriam freezes, because no, _two _guns have gone off, and though Clayton is now tilting drunkenly backward to lie splayed in the hard earth the long rider, too, stumbles, and then he falls, a neat hole spilling brains from his temple.

“What in the good hell,” another rider yells, and then Miriam feels the hard hands on her arms release their grip, letting her wriggle away to press herself against the backs and sides of Mason and Arabella, both of whom are staring wide-eyed out into the darkness.

“Keep a good eye out,” one of the outlaws says, sounding newly nervous. “They must’ve had a friend we didn’t catch – ”

Another bullet, another genteel, almost delicate, sort of fall, as another of the long riders topples, his bloody head hissing as it lies over the boundary of the campfire.

“Fuckin’ shit!” one of the ambushers yelps, and now they are rattled. Two break for their horses, and are followed by another bullet from the darkness of the trees; it catches one of them in the ankle, and he screams, but continues hobbling towards his shying mount. Three others rush for the trees in the rough direction from which the shots have come, but two more are hit before they reach the treeline – and the third thinks better of it.

Their fleeing feet, and the dull trail of their horses’ hooves, takes a good while to fade before Miriam feels able to get to her feet, finding herself trembling far more than she would like as she waits to see if the unseen assailant will shoot her, too. Their hands are still bound, but Arabella is working at the rope around her wrists, rubbing them raw and bloody in the process as her breath hisses between her teeth in frustration, and Mason – Mason has lurched on his knees over towards Clayton, panting, and Miriam can see as she totters closer that she hadn’t been wrong when she’d heard the long rider’s gun go off. Clayton is still breathing, but there is a bloody furrow plowed along the side of his head, hair and flesh all mangled along his scalp above his left ear, and there is no sign of consciousness in him.

“You free yet, Mrs. Whitlock?” Mason hisses, trying to keep his voice low as his gaze jumps between Clayton and the trees, and back again. “I don’t think it hit bone, but head wounds can bleed like anything. We gotta staunch it fast – ”

“Not – yet,” Arabella grunts back. “Hold on one goddamn second – ”

A branch snaps very deliberately underfoot in the distance, and they all still, holding their breath, as a shadow emerges from the trees. Miriam can’t make out their features for a long moment; it is the Reverend, closest, who takes in a sharp breath and then lurches to his feet again, all six foot of him upright, bristling, and threatening as he stands over Sharpe and spreads his body out as much as he can in his state in front of Miriam and Arabella.

“Stop,” he booms, and, not for the first time, Miriam remembers just how frightening the man of God can choose to be. “No closer.”

The figure pauses, and the shadow of the rifle at their side lowers. “Well,” says an even voice. “That’s not necessarily the ‘thank you’ I was hopin’ for – but I suppose that’s to be expected.”

“Fogg,” Arabella breathes, her eyes wide.

“Yes ma’am,” Fogg says, and now Miriam can see him as her memory fills out her sight – Aloysius, standing there in the outer reaches of light from the fire, calm, planted, dusty from the trail. “May I come and help you?”

Arabella’s breath comes short and quick as Miriam, an undercurrent of panic thrumming through her, looks quickly between all of them – Clayton bleeding, the Reverend unmoving as stone, Fogg standing there as casual as if they were meeting for a prearranged drink.

“All right,” Arabella says sharply, and then she is striding forward, turning her back and her bloodied arms towards Aloysius. “Hurry up and get this damn cord off’a me so I can tend to him.”

Aloysius draws his Bowie knife, and the Reverend makes a sound that makes Miriam think of a wolf, hunted and trapped; but he just steps forward, leaving his rifle behind on the ground, and leans over behind Arabella, sliding the blade sideways under the ropes and easily slicing them away. Arabella brings her arms around to her front, her whole face screwing up in a grimace of pain; it soon passes, though, not least because she is already hurrying to Sharpe, pulling bandages and the other tools of her trade out of deep pockets on the inside of her coat. Fogg comes to Miriam next, and she juts her arms out behind her to make it easier for the knife; he smells the same, she thinks, absently, like tobacco and the afterthought of whiskey. When the Reverend is free, too, Fogg steps back and just stands there, loose-limbed, by the fire, silent, while Mason and Arabella go about their hurried, efficient work in whispers.

“I think he’ll be alright,” Arabella sighs, after a few minutes of packing gauze and strips of cotton. “Matthew was right, it didn’t strike the skull. He’ll have a hell of a headache when he wakes, but so long as infection doesn’t set in I hope it’ll only be a nasty scar.”

“Thank the Lord,” Mason mumbles; he goes on to whisper what Miriam knows to be more praises, exhausted and trembling, under his breath.

“Y’all should get your rest before you travel back,” Fogg interjects, startling most of them. “I’ll keep watch, if you trust me to do so.”

Mason’s hands seize in Clayton’s jacket, and Miriam steps forward before either he or Arabella can object. “I’ll stay awake with you,” she says firmly. “I’m sure you understand, Mr. Fogg.”

“I surely do.”

It takes a little more persuading, of hushed and virulent whispers between the three of them that are conscious, but Miriam knows her plan will be accepted from the first; Mason is too wounded, both in body and soul, to protest overmuch, and Arabella is tired, so tired, the nervous energy of the entire night rasping anxiously across her nerves in a way Miriam has become practiced in recognizing and treating with her tender care whenever she can. They don’t fall asleep right away, either – Miriam loses track of time, for a little while, as she waits for this proof of their resilience – but eventually all is quiet, the fire built up into a semblance of heat by the addition of a few split logs that Fogg brings over from the treeline, and they are sitting side by side under the moon as though all was well.

“It was you, then, wasn’t it? Watching us. It’s been weeks.”

“That it was.”

“Why?” Miriam asks, and then she just waits.

“I don’t know what I can tell you,” Aloysius begins. “There was something – I think there might’ve been something wrong with me, in the week or so after it happened. I wonder whether the curse – the magic – that we were placed under left some part of me missing. It was as if I had never cared about anything.”

He takes a long breath, holds it. “And then I did, once again, and I don’t think I had ever hated myself so much. I came right back to Deadwood, and I waited, and I watched, to see if you might have needed me – and I’m glad I did.”

“All that time,” she says, mostly to herself. “All that time, and you never told us you were a bounty hunter. There might have been a time and a place for that, Aloysius, which would have made it easy to right the wrong before it was ever committed.”

Aloysius stares at her, unblinking, hollow, taut as a cocked hammer. "How do you suppose it feels, Miss Miriam," he says, finally, "admitting to being a black man that makes a livin' off of hunting down fugitives for money?"

Miriam doesn’t breathe. She can’t.

“I seen all sorts of things men take to be justice,” Fogg continues, his eyes very far away. “I seen women put down in the fields. I seen children taken from their parents’ arms backed up by the warrant of a white man who called himself a judge. Even in a world that claims to call me free, I seen men shoot each other for money, for drugs, for gold, for anything unhuman over this thing we claim to have, this thing, justice.

“I seen a man whipped to death,” he continues, and now his voice wavers and his eyes blink – “and it weren’t even in a cotton field. It was a sheriff, in a place that might as well have been called hell, but it was called Lago. The townsfolk who ran the place didn’t like his particular brand of justice. They had illegal dealings they wanted protected, and so three of them gathered round and stripped the flesh right off of the marshal as he crawled down the street, beggin’ for his life.”

When he trails off, Miriam swallows, twists her hands together in her lap. “What do you call it, Aloysius?” she says, gently, tilting her head towards him so he is forced to look at her again, really look at her. “What do you call justice?”

Fogg sighs, and the sound drifts around them, gradually swallowed up by the crackle of the glowing embers. “I don’t rightly know the answer to that today, Miss Miriam,” he says. “But I can tell you that it’s not what I did on the thoroughfare of Deadwood.”

Clayton mumbles and mutters in his sleep; they both turn to watch him, keep a careful eye out as he twitches and winces and then settles again, his head still tucked across the Reverend’s outstretched arm.

“When he wakes,” Fogg murmurs, “I’ll most likely tell him that I ain’t never been the kind to ask for forgiveness.”

Miriam smiles, and the warmth of the campfire floods all the way through her, suddenly, like a heatwave in the desert. “He’ll most likely reply that he ain’t the forgiving kind, my dear.”

Fogg nods, slowly, and Miriam watches a knot in him loosen, way down in his guts, as his shoulders begin to slope downwards with fatigue.

“All right, then,” he says, and then he moves off, just a touch awkwardly, and sits at the outskirts of the campfire again, rifle at the ready, peering out into the shadows.

Miriam stands, quietly, and, after checking on Clayton again, relieved by his deep, even breathing and the gentle sleeping grip Mason has on his arm, settles herself next to Arabella. Her beautiful witch is smiling at something in her dreams, and for the first time since she first arrived on the outskirts of Deadwood, Miriam Landisman thinks that the final piece of the puzzle that is her hope has slotted home.

*

**FIN**

*

**Author's Note:**

> MORE then most faire, full of the liuing fire  
Kindled aboue vnto the maker neere:  
no eies buy ioyes, in which al powers conspire,  
that to the world naught else be counted deare.  
Thrugh your bright beams doth not [the] blinded guest,  
shoot out his darts to base affections wound;  
but Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest  
in chast desires on heauenly beauty bound.  
You frame my thoughts and fashion me within,  
you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake,  
you calme the storme that passion did begin,  
strong thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak.  
Dark is the world, where your light shined neuer;  
well is he borne that may behold you euer.
> 
> \- Spenser's _Amoretti_, Sonnet 8
> 
> A/N: I'm not into Westerns per se and I don't know Deadwood at all, but I somehow managed to get super caught up in the aesthetics of it all recently; after the show started airing I got ahold of and re-read the pretty awesome _Murphy_ series by Gary Paulsen for tone and details. The story about a sheriff being whipped to death comes from _High Plains Drifter_, which my husband just happened to be watching the other day. AND my job these days is pretty much to teach undergraduates what justice is/might be over 3,000 years of philosophy. Synergyyyy...


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